At night, we played cards. When we finished and were filing out of the room, Ginger swung a shirt at a huge scary bug circling the dangling bare light bulb, but hit the bulb instead and sent it shattering against the ceiling in a shower of really cool fire and sparks. Then Ginger and Allen went to bed and David and I made garlic bread and eggs and sat on the blackened porch watching the horizon, which was filled from one end to the other with the boat lights of night fishermen.

      Around noon, we took a 45 minute walk inland to a school to introduce David to the head of the local elementary school. The man came up out of a river following a herd of cattle and went into his house to throw on dry clean clothes. Emerging from his house, we cringed as we watched what would surely become in mere moments a food gift of some kind of weird ass fruit, being washed in nasty, nasty, nasty human feces, amoeba and dysentery contaminated river water. A machete was skillfully used to put deep slashes in the fruit in order to allow it to be easily pulled apart and eaten, but to our minds, that just gave the river water access to the part of the fruit we would have to eat.

      I hate food gifts. You cant decline them without the fairly puzzling consequence of offending the hell out of the food giver. As with gossipy types, if you’ll allow me to draw a little parallel here, such as fill the pueblo of El Tambo to the brim, the most galling thing is not what stories about you they know, it’s that they want to them know so badly. If you were to tell a crowd of people, “Hi guys, just wanted to let you all know I’ve been gerbiling this evening” and they were to look at you like “and your point is?” it would be a total non-event. But when even the sight of you talking to a girl sends wild rippling along the Tambo gossip networks, it is very, very annoying. This is what I hate about food gifts. If I don’t want to stick something in my mouth, I think that should be my uncontested right. Sometimes, indeed most times when I’m out and about, I don’t want to eat random foods just because they are made available- especially when the food is something involved and sticky and requiring me to grope it heavily with my dirty hands. I don’t want people to want me to eat anything so badly that to decline is criminal. Sure, it’s nice when you ask someone if they want lemonade and they say “Oh my god! Lemonade would be the greatest thing in the world right now”, but does it really make sense to be offended if they happen not to want lemonade? Shouldn’t the person actually wanting the food be of any consideration in this exchange? How does a piece of random fruit laying around a guy’s house- an abundant fruit without monetary value by his own admission- become something so heavily representative of his symbolic worth as a human being? I don’t give a damn if you all are walking upright, employing complex languages and using refined tools- y’all are still some monkey asses.

      Monkey man (a really cool guy, in the interest of accuracy) gave us a tour of his school. Some group had recently donated a huge amount of killer educational materials. It was awesome. The little school in the middle of nowhere, which had yet to begin for the year, was overflowing with maps and learning games, abacuses and toys, books, art supplies and even a plastic model of a human skeleton. Out of a box I pulled a big transparent plastic bear that was packed with Lego’s and deadpanned my disbelief at Ginger.

      “Legos” monkey man said, as though explaining something to a mentally retarded person who would not grasp a more thorough explanation. Yes, I know what Lego’s are, monkey man. I seem to recall having a Lego birthday party some 20 years ago and spending half my childhood building stuff out of my impressive Lego cache. It was just the thought of a little block shack of a schoolhouse in the middle of nowhere being hooked up with everything a mind should hope to experience, even down to the Legos. By local standards, this was a gift of incalculable value. Even if by chance a school had this kind of money to burn, where is it going to come across such a thorough collection of educational materials? Where does someone in an isolated part of Ecuador come across a plastic model of a human skeleton? I can already see the kids being just mesmerized by that thing. It kind of makes one wonder about the cost effectiveness of such an education. How much of that education will ever really be used? How many of these kids will really escape the campo and go to Quito to become bankers and lawyers?

      Back at David’s beach house, we all engaged in the fairly reckless activity of body surfing in what were basically giant shorebreaks. Occasionally, someone caught a good wave that they ultimately lost control of, getting slammed on the ground and flipped head over heels on the sandy shore, sending the rest of us into fits of scornful laughter. The game was made all the more fun in the knowledge that it was only a matter of time before someone got disgraced on the shore, even if that someone was you. Sometimes you would get messed up so badly that you’d emerge sandy from the retreating foam laughing the hardest of anyone because you had a front row seat to just how tossed like a rag doll you had been. However, the day’s big winner was David, who not only managed to get fully disgraced in a catastrophic breaker, but scrambled in alarm to his feet only to have his pants ripped down by a subsequent wave. He then sat out on the beach covered in sand and looking out at the world uneasily- a sight that would later cause many an episode of hushed laughter when David would bring up how he still felt a little shaken from the incident.

      Lobster for dinner, then played cards again at night.

      In the morning, I found myself weighing my options concerning staying or going. I had absolutely no reason to get home, but I had the nagging voice in my head telling me there would be more guts involved in striking out on my own today, rather than spending another day doing nothing on the porch and then following Ginger and Allen out to civilization when they left their site forever. But… if I did wait till tomorrow, I at least would have David, who was heading as far as Atacames for shopping, to hang out with until my night bus left, rather than killing time for hours alone. Besides, I kinda wanted to see what someone leaving their site forever looked like. I would likely never get another chance to be present for that. But the voice in my head won out. We had used so many screwy modes of transportation that were contingent on so many screwy factors that I was not part of discussing, that I didn’t really have a clue how to leave there. I had just been following the people who knew what was going on. The feeling that I was dependent on others, like a little boy, patiently waiting by for someone to take the initiatives I was incapable of, began grating irrationally on my mind like a horrible Cumbia beat on a lengthy bus ride.

      I announced to the others that I was kicking around the idea of leaving, just so that my announcing it later wouldn’t come as a surprise. I was told that if the camionetta isn’t running (which often happens if rain turns the crude road into deep mud), in order to catch my boat to Muisne, it would be best to leave just before the tide reaches its maximum height, so that I didn’t have to get slammed by waves when the narrow beach in front of the cliffs disappears altogether. At 2:30 pm, it became the aforementioned stage of tide and I set off down the beach. It is was a walk that David will come to take for granted, but not one I shall soon forget. Alone on pristine, abandoned beach, not strolling aimlessly in the vicinity of some hotel, but rather on a mission and thoroughly uncertain of the outcome. It was only about a 45 minute walk until I happened upon a post that I had been told would indicate an inland path leading me to what would ‘obviously be a boat launch’. Rather than a “path”, it was more like just where the beach grass didn’t grow all the way up to a fence, and rather than an ‘obvious boat launch’, it was a log stuck in the ground by the water’s edge. There were 4 fisherman loafing in the shade nearby, so I figured this had to be the spot.

      The fishermen soon engaged me in conversation. I found that in spite of being “just fisherman”, they spoke about things in an intelligent- almost intellectual- manner. Beyond never once giving me a blank stare when I introduced topics I had no reason to believe they had knowledge of, they almost always flowed effortlessly with the turn of the conversation, in spite of what they or may not have known, throwing out appropriate facts from time to time and holding their own 100%. I’m not actually sure if the sentence I just typed made any sense, but what I’m trying to say is that these fisherman, as well as all the other people I’ve encountered in Esmereldas to be a lot more intelligent than I am accustomed to dealing with in this country. To boot, they are about as affable as folks come.

      Several boats passed our log without stopping. After more than 45 minutes waiting, a boat pulled up to our log and we jumped in. The fishermen and I continued sporadic conversation all the way to Muisne. In Muisne, I jumped a bus heading up the coast to Atacames, as Atacames has a TransEsmereldas bus line that makes a night trip to Guayaquil. Atacames is also an hour closer to Guayaquil than Esmereldas (the city).

      For a time, I believed I had been reading my book right through Atacames and had resigned myself to an extra hour to Esmereldas, where the food would suck and hanging out after dark greatly complicated. When a sign saying we were entering Atacames flew passed my window, I danced a jig and then scrambled to round up my belongings. I walked down to the beach and ate a beautiful pizza. I inquired at the pizza place how far away the bank and TransEsmereldas were. About a mile I was told. I would have had no problem walking the mile, but not in the darkness of a city I knew nothing about. I asked if there were taxis (I had not seen any) and was told to flag down the guys on the big tricycles with carts on the front and for 50 cents they will run you anywhere you need to go. That is exactly what I did, and within 15 minutes I had already been through the bank and was standing in the TransEsmereldas bus station buying a ticket to Guayaquil. I had a few hours to kill before my bus left and kicked around the idea of catching another 50 cent ride back to the tourist area, but since I could not think of a valid activity to do once I got there, I opted instead to stay put and read my Fountainhead book, which I a still working on because I only read it on long trips.

      In Santa Elena I picked up my mail at the post office and then bought the supplies to hand wash clothes at a store. I had stopped paying Susanna to wash my clothes long ago when her pick-up of said clothing became too infrequent. I had been using a laundromat (not self serve) in Santa Elena recently, but the clothes weren’t coming back fully clean and required me to make 2 trips into Santa Elena to both drop off and pick up the clothes. I had been watching Ginger and Allen for the past week forever soaking their own clothes and casually agitating/brushing them clean before hang drying. It didn’t look terribly taxing and meant that I could wash tiny loads at my leisure and never have to inconvenience myself again around laundry trips to Santa Elena.

      There were a few obstacles to my self-clothes washing to hurdle. One is the fact that I abandoned Susanna’s clothes washing service in favor of a laundromat, which had been received by her as something of a trauma. If you are a woman in an Ecuadorian pueblo, your identity will be 99% accounted for in the few household chores you perform. You know nothing else, you do nothing else. Woman = housework, and house work is just sweeping, cooking, washing clothes and breast feeding (where applicable, and note that I did not say “raising the kids”).

      This is also a country where one doesn’t ask for options. One does not walk into a restaurant and ask for a menu, one simply says “gimme the lunch”. One does not say, “I prefer this brand of shampoo to that one” or “that picture on the wall would be perfect one inch further to the left”. People are not choosy here. So when someone for whom you wash clothes suddenly goes way out of their way to take them elsewhere (it’s not really ‘way out of my way’, but having Susanna wash them entailed absolutely no effort on my part, and from her perspective, going “into town” is a big deal) it seems obvious that they were very dissatisfied by something about your service. Susanna had felt somewhat humiliated by my change of laundry services. Humiliation can be particularly humiliating when the humiliator is being polite towards you and making a conscious effort to downplay the problem, rather than discrediting themselves by exaggerating the problem just to make a point. It is further humiliating when the covert dissatisfaction comes from a gringo who is a guest in your home.

      There was no way to communicate to Susanna that her laundering was great, I just prefer to have clothes cleaned when I want them cleaned. People here never address anything directly, especially a perceived friction. Us discussing the laundry situation would have been like us discussing an accidental fart. You aren’t supposed to acknowledge a farting faux pas; everyone present just thinks to themselves “oh my god” and then continues on with the rest of their lives. And my explanation would have smacked of “disgruntled” to her anyway and she would assume that I was just voicing the least of my dissatisfactions, as no one here ever comes out with what is really on their mind.

      I decided that since washing my clothes in secret was not an option and would only put a shameful twist on everything when I was finally busted, that I would just announce publicly that everyone in the Peace Corps but me washes their own clothes and now I wanted to learn how it was done too. By putting Susanna in the role of clothes-washing teacher, I indirectly validate her clothes-washing prowess while inoculating my own reasons for wanting to learn. I would likely be inviting widespread ridicule for engaging in such an unambiguously feminine activity, but I was prepared to brutally de-fang the first machista that opened his mouth with a few irrefutable facts on why his precious masculinity is but a fraud perpetrated by insecure nobodies. You’re going to need a lot more than not-washing clothes to authenticate that machismo, cabrón. Now shuffle home to your bamboo shack, big man, and ask your sister if she knows me.

      Julio was the only one home when I arrived. He rushed into my room to gorge himself on tales and artifacts brought back from the world outside of Tambo. He was thrilled and greatly amused that I had not only come home with an inexplicable clothes washing fixation, but an industrial size bag of detergent and bottle of bleach as well. Reading the bag of detergent aloud with an exaggerated lack of sophistication, I announced that I needed to dissolve my detergent in water and soak clothes for a minimum of 2 hours. Julio excitedly made himself a sort of junior partner in this venture by running for and dragging out Susanna’s plastic clothes washing tubs and suggesting a location in the backyard to set up shop.

      I am not sure whether it was due to the spectacle of my proud ineptitude or my shameless bucking of the system, but Julio’s delight was infinite. He ran to meet Susanna the very second he heard her entering the front of the house and the duo emerged into the back yard a moment later exhibiting sharply contrasting expressions. Susanna rushed towards me the way I imagine she might, had she found me lying in a pool of blood rather than preparing to wash clothes. She demanded to know why I was “trying to wash clothes”. When I hesitated for an instant before beginning a response, she again demanded to know why I was “trying to wash clothes”. My answer did nothing to alter the ‘spooked horse’ expression she now wore. She fixed me with a wild-eyed, sidelong glare of pure suspicion while I elaborated on my reasons. She tried desperately to read what it was that I intended to communicate by taking on my own laundry. The explanation I offered her at length was completely dismissed, as is the custom among people who never communicate frankly.

      “I’ll wash the clothes”, Susanna said with a vocal inflection that almost made it a question.

      I reasserted that I would be washing the clothes and she was merely to be my technical consultant. She admonished me saying that everyone was going to laugh at me if I washed clothes. I turned around to address Julio, who was beside himself with amusement at this exchange, with my response to Susanna’s admonishment saying that everyone laughs at me already. Julio cracked up at this observation so uproariously that Susanna could not help but guffaw. It was true, after all. I then offered, by way of mock concession, that I would wash clothes hidden in my room with the door shut if she would only give the endeavor her blessing. Susanna was won over. She sighed aloud, as if to state for the record her misgivings, and then said we should move the soaking clothes into the house.

      While the clothes soaked, Julio and I got wrapped up in an intense discussion about the details of a plan we have recently hatched involving the solicitation of grant money for some kind of animal project. The 3 main obstacles have always been the same: 1) how to flout the notorious, project-destroying bickering of Tambo folk that turns up when there is work to be done, and 2) how to involve multiple people in a project that could realistically be pulled off by a single, mildly overworked person. My solution has remained pretty consistent: united we stand, divided we fall. If the work is broken up among numerous, independent cells of al Qaeda operatives, there can be no one but oneself to blame when one’s piece of the project goes belly up from neglect. Each person is directly responsible for his or her own income generation. But then in the larger picture, the numerous cells of operatives are loosely centralized in a way that maximizes purchasing power and grant money-soliciting power. Simply put, it’s a Cooperative. The 3rd obstacle, corruption, is fairly easy to overcome. No action or decision can ever be placed in the hands of any single individual, and every action must be recorded and the records of said action made readily available to everyone. Total transparency. But I shan’t further elaborate on our plan until the numerous bugs are completely worked out.

      After lunch Susanna and I ganged up on a load of laundry. When she determined that I was indeed fending well for myself, she left me to finish out the load alone while she returned her assistance to her niece and nephew, whom she had been helping with homework. Susanna’s instructions had stated that after the pre-soaking of clothing in detergent water, each item of clothing would be removed, brushed lightly or briskly in accordance with the durability of the fabric over every square inch, front and back, wrung out and tossed back into fresh detergent water to begin the process all over- 5 times. I told her that doing that amount of work 5 times over was pure insanity and only served to prematurely destroy clothing. One time through was by far more thorough than machine washing and was thus sufficient.. I announced that I would concede to doing 2 cycles- as every article of clothing has 2 sides- but spent the 2nd cycle mostly inspecting the clothing and tossing it aside unbrushed as it was deemed clean. The final rinsing out in pure water cycle was to be done twice.

      At 4:45pm, I left for internet. Phone lines were boogered up Santa Elena, so I caught a second bus into Libertad. My email had not been checked in more than a week and 22 letters awaited my attention. The computers were slow, Hotmail was exasperating and by the time I left for Tambo at about 7:30 pm with my head spinning from hours of rushed emailing. The majority of the letters were saved to disk to be attended to on my computer at home. I arrived in Tambo at 8pm, ate dinner, and then got back into discussions of projects and grants with Julio. In order to pacify Julio with answers to questions we could not know without the SPA grant forms in our hands, I placed a call to Ela, who I knew had recently applied for a SPA grant herself. After the pone call, I stayed up until about 11pm attempting to get some writing done.

      I walked down the street to a computer repair shop to ask how much the computers I’m selling are worth. The guy told me $100, which is absurdly low. Maybe he thought I was asking him to make me an offer?

      From the computer repair shop I went to the mall to eat and buy some stuff at the dollar store. Then I went to the park across the street from the mall and picked from the landscape a bag full of various plants to bring home.

      Back in Tambo, I walked straight through the house and out the side door into the yard, where I began immediately planting my new acquisitions. I found in the roots of one of the plants, two of what looked like some kind of intestinal worm. They were yellow and shiftless with a black shovel-like head. I killed them both, but wondered what kind of epidemic I had just introduced into the yard.

      Lorena phoned before dinner to tell me she and her coworker want to go around town taking pictures with me tomorrow. Lorena has been unsuccessful heretofore in adding my picture to her collection of friend photographs, despite several attempts, due to a constant chain of mishaps with ruined rolls of film or malfunctioning cameras. Tomorrow, she wants to use my camera to ensure that no mishaps occur. She was also traumatized that I had laughed and called her “shady” earlier and she wanted to vow to be unguarded and direct from now on, ‘like me’.

      I refuse to engage the mass amounts of customary subterfuge that people here employ to get their points across to each other without ever just coming right out and stating what’s on their minds. My method of operation here has been to say what’s on my mind in 25 words or less and to hell with whomever doesn’t like it. This isn’t just my excuse to go around being tactless, but rather the sane, streamlined antithesis of a society that conducts itself like a junior high school girl trying to communicate her interest to a boy through the most outlandishly indirect channels. Its absurd the lengths people will go to here to obscure how they really think and feel. They learn to shut their peers out of their heads the way other people learn to close the bathroom door when they take a big dump. Whereas I am in favor of people closing the bathroom door to take a dump, it irritates me to no end when I am talking to someone for 15 minutes before it dawns on me that we are not really talking about what we appear to be talking about, but rather some other topic deemed ‘sensitive’ that I cant figure out for the life of me because the person with whom I am speaking is conducting themselves like an autistic. Neither do I enjoy repeating the same sentiment 10 times because someone is ignoring my literal statement trying to pick up on what I am really saying. Lorena is no exception to this fact of life in Ecuador and I called her on it because I haven’t patience for such. Her reaction to it came as a surprise.

      Ivan, almost certainly as a direct result of my smashing the gender rules by washing clothes, cooked the family’s dinner tonight all by himself, which is straight up “woman’s work”. He did a great job and I told him as much. It was Susanna’s version of EcuaFood, but with a brash, young male edge to it. He said that next week would be my turn to whip up dinner on the gas range. If I had one piece advice to send backwards to myself through time to my arrival in Tambo, it would be to drop the clinical, cause-and-effect based approach to social change. Addressing the undisciplined murk of the public with crisp pig-raising lectures or the announcement that I’m here to help with projects is completely worthless. Its like trying to remove a stick from the middle of a pile of chopped bramble with the precision deftness of a salad tong. Every stick is held back by its relationship to every other stick. Scheming to remove specific sticks with surgical precision will be a maddening quagmire.

      A better approach would be using a stick of dynamite. And it doesn’t even matter where the flying debris lands. Just break up the inertia of the bramble and let the chips fall where they may. Seriously. Just keep doing cannonballs into that pool and surf any waves that may bounce back to you. Here in the coast of Ecuador, no matter how egregiously you make a fool of yourself, no matter how offensive it is your habit to be, as long as you are laughing and keep your gums flapping, people will love you. Throw a brick through the plate glass window of Social Convention with a big smile on your face and the dislodged shards will automatically try to follow you.

      My seriousness and discipline has only served to alienate me from the average Tambonian. If people identify you with the Paternal style of social aid that has always been unsuccessfully employed in this country, they will expect you to take care of initiating projects by yourself and you will be fully tuned out. The only thing that is real to this bunch of laughing hyenas is a clown.

      Julio walked into my room at the exact moment I was tossing a folded up, short-sleeved, button-down shirt onto my bed and asked me, without any evident curiosity “Are you going to get handsome? (Vas a poner guapo?)” We laughed because we both knew the sentiment had fallen out of his mouth before it could be touched up by the Quality Control in his brain. I explained to Julio that Lorena, her coworker and I were going to take pictures today in Libertad when the 2 of them get off work.

      I knew better than to expect the event to venture out of the annoying spectrum and turn into the type of photo expeditions we used to do in the States. In spite of repeatedly telling Lorena’s co worker that she has to hold the camera perfectly still because the light was getting low enough to cause a slow shutter speed, she continued to depress the shutter release every time by jabbing her finger into it, as if trying to catch it by surprise, which jolted the camera significantly. Telling her the button needs to be pushed gently changed nothing, thus neither did Lorena’s unlucky streak concerning bad photography.

      After a really long, aimless wandering about town, often in the road itself, Lorena’s coworker, the misdirecting factor of our hanging out, left. Lorena and I then went to the mall so I could eat. I tried to make Lorena order food, but she got weird, as she always has in the Mall’s food court, and I got myself something to eat with no further consideration of her state of hunger. Inspired by my cheeseburger and fries, I told lots of stories over my increasingly empty tray until the mall was threatening to close at 8pm. Then I bought a big plastic tub, which women here use to wash clothes, and left for Tambo. Lorena left for a party at her grandma’s house, which I had declined to attend.

      Only Ivan was at home when I arrived. The rest had gone up t’ Merci’s tienda. Ivan was soon headed there himself. I set a load of laundry soaking in my new plastic tub and went to sleep.

      Around 4 or 5pm, Lorena came over for about an hour and a half. She tried to learn a little bit about computers, which she has expressed an interest in and then helped me thin out non-Ecuadorian words from my Spanish vocabulary list I had compiled from a dictionary.

      Sometime after dinner, the family slipped off to Merci’s tienda without a word, which was way out of character.